“Facilitating this expression of free speech is no longer viable, nor in interest of public health and safety”
by zunguzungu
UPDATE: If anyone would like to call Oakland mayor Jean Quan and tell her to stop the eviction of the Occupy Oakland encampment, the number is 510-238-3141.
Occupy Oakland is an illegal camp; from the beginning, they’ve neither negotiated, compromised, nor even communicated with the police or with City Hall. Jean Quan, the Mayor, is fairly liberal and at least nominally sympathetic. She marched on Saturday with the mayors of Richmond and Berkeley to “add their voices to the public outcry for government to invest in jobs and stop cutting needed programs for the poor and middle class,” and while it wasn’t exactly part of Occupy Oakland, that march did try to “connect” with it (Omar has details on that), and spent time at Frank Ogawa plaza. Who knows what Jean Quan really thinks of it all; someone in the camp was telling me about looking up at City Hall and seeing her in the window, looking down at them, a cinematic moment in my mind.
Last night, the camp received an eviction notice. They keep getting letters from the city, and I actually got my hands on a green one that actually thanks the occupiers for making concessions on some of the city’s demands. This is putting it very nicely, however; in fact, when the city first sent a list of demands to the camp, someone burned it with a lighter at the general assembly, to what was described to me as general approval. They have continued to be — utterly and without exception — unwilling to let the city dictate to them in any manner whatsoever. And so far, the city has done nothing (in sharp contrast to Occupy SF, who has negotiated and compromised with the police, and as a result, been subjected to arrests and destruction of their camps and supplies).
Many thought that would change last night — the idea that sending Occupy Oakland an eviction notice would get them to leave or change their ways is obviously false, so it seems like the letter is a prelude to violent removal. But so far the city has done nothing. The people at the Snow Park expansion camp told me about how the police wake them up in the morning — which depending on who you talk to was either passive intimidation or a direct stand-off — but as far as I know, they’re still there too, longer than I expected them to be. They’re a much smaller camp, and in some ways more threatening, since it marks the movement as more than simply symbolically oriented on City Hall, marks a desire to continue spreading. But the police haven’t come in force there either.
So while we’re waiting, let’s read that eviction note, which opens by declaring its support for both freedom of expression and such responsibilities as “public safety, public health, and crowd control.” These things are equal, the letter notes. And if they are equal responsibilities, you see, City Hall can indeed have it both ways, balance them: they can be on the side of “expression” while also using violent force to disperse a peaceful assembly. But trying to have it both ways forces the city into a rhetorical figure that’s quite revealing in its ugly clarity:
“Administration has determined that facilitating this expression of free speech is no longer viable, nor in interest of public health and safety”
Examine the assumptions of that sentence: the expressers of free speech can only express their speech to the extent that the city “facilitates” it. This is obviously not true, of course; the only reason this peaceful and truly remarkable assembly of Oaklanders is possible is that the police and city have had no part in it and have been excluded from the start. But Jean Quan wants to be supportive: she is a liberal mayor and this is (in rough outlines at least) a kind of leftish movement. If she simply said that the occupation is illegal and has to stop because it’s illegal, she wouldn’t have to bring up free speech at all. But then she couldn’t claim solidarity of any sort. So, to be supportive — whether because she is, or because she has a political reason to be — she has decided to support their right to be there, and so has interpreted their presence in the only safe way she can come up with: as “speech.”
But this creates a new problem: once you’ve acknowledged that the occupation is an expression of free speech, how can you also claim the right to evict people from that space? What she does, then, is worth noting: she asserts the city’s right to overrule constitutionally protected rights, to declare them “no longer viable,” in the name of “public health and safety.” We should not be innocent enough to be shocked by this, but we should note the kind of kind of power that her rhetoric draws her into claiming: she makes the one and only thing she’s done — the fact that she hasn’t overrun the camp with cops, a la Melbourne — into “facilitating” free speech. You can put aside all the other stuff in that letter, which is a laundry list of trumped up concerns that a police action would do nothing to solve but only a great job of making the problem invisible again. The core of it is the remarkable claim that speech is free only to the extent that the state elects not to use violent force to squash it. And the assertion that it can do so when it decides it is necessary, in the names of abstractions like “public health and safety.”
zunguzungu 
states of exception
Great postings from Occupy Oakland. Today’s Chronicle has a column by Chip Johnson which seems to rely mainly on insinuation rather than specifics, saying Occupy Oakland “has taken an ugly turn.” I work nearby and visit regularly, and that’s not what I see.
The problem for me, as someone who is wholeheartedly in favor of occupying and decolonizing everything, and also someone who has spent at least a little time at Occupy Oakland every other day or so, is that there are actually some legitimately screwy parts of the camp.
I LOVE the community kitchen! I am impressed with the children’s village! I respect the medical team! The library makes me cry tears of joy!
But I also feel really uncomfortable there a lot of the time. There are fights. There is smoking everywhere. There are mentally ill, high people yelling at people. I have not showed up to the meetings and recognize it’s my responsibility as much as anyone else’s to do so, but I’m also a single parent so just showing up as a body is the best I can do at this point. And it’s unappealing to get really involved when it seems to be an intentional decision to not take internal safety seriously. No one wants to be a cop, but the refusal to create internal structures for making the space feel welcome and safe to more people is not the ideal community I wish for.
And you know, the city’s other complaints are not so off the wall either. I don’t really like the graffiti. Oakland is broke and I know they’re now going to spend money they don’t have to blast that stuff off the steps. Like I said, I’m a parent. I’m acutely aware of every dollar that doesn’t get spent on, say, the libraries, or my kid’s school, or basic city infrastructure. Can folks go tag their anticapitalist messages on the Bank of America down the street please? Fire hazards are a valid concern too.
I want Occupy Oakland to stay. I would like to get more involved in helping that happen and maybe I will. But I think we should be honest about the limitations of the community as it is now. That doesn’t even necessarily mean there needs to be negotiation with the city – I’m talking about internal accountability.
I hear everything that you say. I’d just quote Omar on this:
The fact that Occupy Oakland hasn’t solved all its problems is a problem. But we shouldn’t pretend that the status quo (or the alternative) was somehow better, or that they aren’t working to come to grips with the things you’re describing. They *are* working to “police” the camp — I’ve talked to some of the people who are trying to get their heads and hands around the problem — but they’re just not using violent police force to do it, which means it’s a bit less inefficient and a lot more human. And the scope of the problem they’re dealing with is both really severe — Oakland is a really sick city, economically — and not of their creation. It’s to their credit that they’ve taken on the challenge of being inclusive and open to all, but that doesn’t mean that challenge gets met with ease or quickly. But the contrast with the city — which gave up giving a shit about homeless or mentally ill people a long time ago, except when the cops rough them up — is pretty striking to me.
Yeah, it seems incredibly complicated to figure out and I take my hat off to the folks who have been trying to address this stuff in a better-than-the-mainstream way.
This site is like a clsoarsom, except I don’t hate it. lol
Reading posts like this make surfing such a pleasure
“Examine the assumptions of that sentence: the expressers of free speech can only express their speech to the extent that the city “facilitates” it. This is obviously not true, of course; the only reason this peaceful and truly remarkable assembly of Oaklanders is possible is that the police and city have had no part in it and have been excluded from the start.”
I honestly don’t understand you here. The city obviously means that “facilitating” = “letting you use this great place to express yourselves, even though it’s illegal and we could boot you.” Which seems to me not an egregious misuse of “facilitating.”
Put another way, simply remove “not” from the 2nd of your sentences that I quoted above and the sentence describes facilitation.
Great post AARon,
Of course it reminds a great deal of my work and your collaboration with me on that work in the texts we observed of American Development workers ‘facilitating’ and ‘opening up spaces’ for Tanzanians to dialogue with each other– as if they couldn’t dialogue without the space or this particular space, “facilitated by the Americans!.” And as I showed again and again, any time those Tanzanians used the space as they chose, and became the empowered people one would have thought they were free to be, the space was shut down, reconfigured, to exclude the very empowered voices, one would have at first understood the Americans to be facilitating.
There are limitations to what can be expressed when facilitated by more powerful others, who will as this case shows, decide to shut down the space if ever what they have “facilitated” doesn’t sit with their own interests. Facilitation is actually a pretty complicated discourse that we may need to interrogate, rather than accept as something inherently positive…. You have once again showed us the red flags that are hidden behind this positive discourse, a discourse that may have come from a previous history, progressive and even radical intentions/movements, but certainly now requires further thought and question.
TM: But that’s exactly my point: JQ’s rhetorical stance is to be supportive — to claim to be facilitating the protest — even though she’s done nothing but *not* use police force to drive them out. Withholding violent suppression of speech does not equal facilitation of speech, or, if it does, something interesting has happened, which is what I’m interested in. I take your point, certainly; that’s the logic behind her statement, to view the park as hers and their presence there to be at her discretion. Which is what I was trying to bring out: in such rhetoric, the role of the state is purely enforcement, and the extent to which it gets involved in free speech is when it graciously allows you not to be silenced by police. But I think what might be getting lost here is the fact that she never calls the camp itself illegal (which it obviously is, but which she can’t admit without then being forced to take a total stance against it). As a result, she’s trying to have it both ways, but actually has it neither: if it’s illegal, she can’t be supporting it (so she won’t admit that it’s basically and fundamentally illegal), but if it’s legal, then she can’t drive them away (so she is forced to pretend that withholding violent force is the same as supporting expression).
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